I am guessing jealousy is eating her inside out with this show of care from him, and I can forgive the beach completely when this is how he reacts to me genuinely being hurt. If one thing never fails to show another side of Dane, it’s this. When he thinks I am injured or sick, the hatred slips for a little while.
“Keep this dry and covered. Apply more of this before bed, too. Take pain meds if it hurts too much.” Dane finally lets me go so he can open the tube and sits so I am pretty much nestled between his open legs on our side-by-side stools, leaning in so my shoulder is touching his chest. He is making it clear I am not allowed to move out of his grasp until he is sure my wounds are properly tended.
He quickly squirts some out and gently smears it on every patch of red he can see, making me flinch because it’s uncomfortable. My skin is sensitive, and it stings.
I am overly aware of Charmaine starting to tap her foot in agitation, but I clamp my jaw tight so I don’t react to the pain of what he is doing.
“Can’t she do it herself?” Charmaine snaps, finally losing her temper, but Dane ignores it again. Not even a flinch on his focused expression and slightly furrowed brow as he searches for every tiny blushed spot and covers it in the cooling gel. Even I know that getting a reaction out of him over a jealousy tantrum will get her the opposite result. He has ditched girls for less.
“Gimme a gauze bandage.” He nods back at the box, and Charmaine leans forward and shoves it at us with force. It scrapes across the surface with a sliding motion. Seething with the fact that he is not rising to her growing bad mood, trying to soothe her, and ignoring her very obvious hints that she doesn’t like him tending to me.
“Find it yourself. I’m going up to your room. I don’t need to sit and watch my boyfriend fucking about over some other girl.” She snaps, no longer holding back her anger, and Dane doesn’t react.
“Sister…. That makes a difference.” He replies calmly and carries on without even a flicker of a glance her way.
Charmaine visually seethes with a twisted, hateful scowl, turns on her heel, and marches out, clicking her stiletto boots on the tiled floor as she stomps. I sit still as a statue, suddenly awkward about being stuck between them this way.
Sure, I get a sense of satisfaction at pissing her off, but I don’t like this weirdness between Dane and me while he's this way. I don’t want to give him more reason to be meaner later when she gives him a hard time.
“Why are you being nice to me?” I ask in a shy, pathetic, hushed tone, watching as he unwraps a bandage and carefully dresses my hand. No longer fighting him and letting the earlier fatigue wash over me and kill all my sass. The gel is not combatting how quickly my skin is beginning to feel hot and stingy, and I think the shock of being scolded is kicking in.
Dane frowns, twitches his jaw muscle as though he doesn’t like the question, exhales heavily, and carries on with what he’s doing, seemingly unwilling to answer it. His concentration is all over cute-boy face he has on now, and I can't help staring at how adorable he can sometimes be. Quietened by the calmness of his posture and how gentle he is being when lifting and wrapping my hand and wrist. Few get to see this side of him.
He has one of those faces, which can either be deathly hot and seductive or, in a flash, with just a few adjustments to the expression, he reverts to a little boy who should be playing with Lego or toy cars. Sometimes mature in looks and sometimes such a baby.
For his bad attitude and thug persona, he also has this side. Less obvious now he’s older, but it’s lingering. The caring and protective side who used to put band aids on my cuts. The boy who held my hand during a thunderstorm at school because I was scared.
“I ordered extra pizza. I’ll leave you one… don’t try cooking what’s left of your food. Go upstairs and take it easy.” Dane shifts away, packing up the box and finally giving me my breathing space back, yet his statement breaks my willpower completely. As he moves out, I catch the hem of his shirt and tug it back. It’s an impulsive and emotionally fueled reaction that even I didn’t expect.
“Is she really your girlfriend? Her?.... The girl you know I have hated since forever?” I gaze up at him searching his face for any hint of how he feels and confused about why we’re like this. My voice is tight, and my heart hammers in my chest like a machine gun.
We fight, argue, and hate one another, but the second one of us gets hurt, it wipes the bullshit away, and this is how we react. This isn’t the first time one of us has jumped to be a nursemaid for the other, and the fight and loathing between us drops to zero in those minutes. Despite our behavior, neither can deny that we care about each other in those flash moments. I don’t want to believe that the person he can be deep down would really want to hurt me by using a girl like Charmaine. Not the guy who only days ago told me he would try to change things so he would never see me cry again.
Dane gently slides my hand from his clothes and avoids looking me in the eye. There’s a subtle shift in the atmosphere as a cold wall comes back up between us; his face tightens, and his eyes grow colder.
“I can’t help who I like….. it is what it is.” He shrugs, and my heart constricts. His tone is nothing except blank and empty, and I swallow hard.
“So you really have feelings for her, then? This isn’t another dig at me to upset me? An attempt to make me dislike you….. because of…..” I can’t even say it.
Because you know I like you.
We both know it, no matter how much I deny it.
It’s been obvious since that day.
“Let’s not do this.” Dane dodges my searching gaze and slides the box up from the counter to put it away, but I get up and follow him. I don’t want to let this moment of truce slide by so easily because I know he’ll return to hostile and blank as soon as this is done. I want to talk about this properly. Not the veiled weird, nothing conversations where we end in anger and insults.
My heart is bleeding; lately, he has confused me so much that it’s all I can think about.
“Why are we like this?” I ask desperately, catching the back of his shirt again, unable to let him leave. Tugging gently like a small child would when needy for your attention. I know it’s pathetic, but I’m running on tiredness, adrenaline, and maybe a little shock.
Dane freezes, caught stiff as he reaches up to open the cupboard, and I feel his tension intensify. He stays stone still for seconds and then exhales slowly and steadily as though trying to control himself. It feels like the longest pause in history.
“We’re siblings…. aren't we meant to torture one another?” his words are stilted and emotionless. His voice is low and strained, so it sounds huskier than normal, and it wields the same effect as stabbing me with something sharp in the gut.
“We used to be friends. You used to act like I mattered.” I despair, feeling him closing up, backing off again, and coming to the lightbulb moment that makes me act as I do toward him daily.
It’s this desperation I am feeling here. This agonizing need to have the boy I used to know come back to me and stop hiding behind his anger at the world. I miss who he was and how he used to be toward me. I miss him treating me kindly and gently like he just did. I miss sitting and talking to him without this weird fuzzy mess between us. I miss a time when I was too young to have him break my heart so effortlessly.
“We can never go back, Kayla. Accept it for what it is. You’re the one person in the world I can’t ever allow myself to be close to…… our parents ensured that.” He jerks his arm so it tugs his clothes out of my hand, then discards the first aid box with a toss to the counter before walking off. Making it clear the door is shut again, and I am back to being on the other side.
“Dane?” I try to draw him back verbally, but he ignores me and leaves. As he gets further away, his footsteps echoing across the floor dim, and I sink in deflation. Finding the stool and lowering the heaviness on my shaky legs down. A piercing spike in the heart because I know exactly what he meant.
My mom ruined his entire life by being the woman his father wanted, and he lost his family, home, and security almost overnight, as did I. Only I tried to make the best of the worst and accept it and adapt. I lost my dad, but if I’m being honest, Bryan has been more of a father to me in the last ten years than my real dad has. Maybe that’s why we’re different.
My dad was a letdown, and Bryan made me feel like I still had one. Bryan opened his arms and heart to me and treated me like I was his daughter. It helped me heal a little and start to forgive them.
Dane’s mom was amazing and kind, yet mine is awful to him and has never been affectionate or maternal to him. She never became a second mother who welcomed and made him feel wanted. He was the baggage she had to accept to be married to his father. I can accept that and see it.
In his eyes, my mom is a scornful witch who broke his mother’s heart. That pushed him out of his own home and holds his father captive. It reminds him daily that she is now firmly rooted between his parents.
I’m her daughter, so I became someone connected to that hatred and pain. He sees her in me.
They made us siblings and forced us together so that the two friends we once were became something broken and toxic, and his scars make it so that he can not separate me from her. His refusal to accept this and move on. His hatred of what I symbolize.
I knew long ago that Dane would never forgive me for accepting them as married and not being on his side of trying to separate them when we were young. He tried enough times.
I get it. I do.
It doesn’t make it hurt me any less.